After Twitter announced its new censorship policy on Thursday, Tweeters were quick to come up with the hashtag #TwitterBlackout, which called for a one-day boycott on Saturday. Were voices heard by not being heard? Maybe a little. And maybe Interneters, still riding high on their campaign to stop SOPA and PIPA, were eager to re-use the blackout technique.
Zynep Tufekci, who writes the Technosociology blog, thinks the new policy “will be helpful to free-speech advocates.” Tufekci thinks it’s possible that censoring tweets in individual countries, which is basically what the new policy could be a rallying cry for anti-censorship. She writes: “Twitter’s latest policy is purposefully designed to allow Twitter to exist as a platform as broadly as possible while making it as hard as possible for governments to censor content, either tweet by tweet or more, all the while giving free-speech advocates a lot of tools to fight censorship.”
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